CHAPTER XXXII

THESE BUSY LATER DAYS

A Typical Week Day.  A Typical Sunday.  Mrs. Conwell.  Back to the Berkshires in Summer for Rest.

By the record of what Dr. Conwell has accomplished may be judged how busy are his days.

In early youth he learned to use his time to the best advantage.  Studying and working on the farm, working and studying at Wilbraham and Yale, told him how precious is each minute.  Work he must when he wanted to study.  Study he must when he needed to work.  Every minute became as carefully treasured as though it were a miser’s gold.  But it was excellent training for the busy later days when work would press from all sides until it was distraction to know what to do first.

“Do the next thing,” is the advice he gives his college students.  It is undoubtedly a saving of time to take the work that lies immediately at hand and despatch it.  But when the hand is surrounded by work in a score of important forms, all clamoring for recognition, what is “the next thing” becomes a question difficult to decide.

Then it is that one must plan as carefully to use one’s minutes as he does to expend one’s income when expenses outrun it.

His private secretary gave the following account, in the “Temple Magazine,” of a week day and a Sunday in Dr. Conwell’s life: 

“No two days are alike in his work, and he has no specified hour for definite classes of calls or kinds of work.

“After breakfast he goes to his office in The Temple.  Here visitors from half a dozen to twenty await him, representing a great variety of needs or business.

“Visitors wait their turn in the ante-room of his study and are received by him in the order of their arrival.  The importance of business, rank or social position of the caller does not interfere with this order.

[Illustration:  The chorus of the Baptist temple]

“Throughout the whole day in the street, at the church, at the College, wherever he goes, he is beset by persons urging him for money, free lectures, to write introductions to all sorts of books, for sermons, or to take up collections for indigent individuals or churches.  Letters reach him even from Canada, asking him to take care of some aunt, uncle, runaway son, or needy family, in Philadelphia.  Sometimes for days together he does not secure five minutes to attend to his correspondence.  Personal letters which he must answer himself often wait for weeks before he can attend to them, although he endeavors, as a rule, to answer important letters on the day they are received.  People call to request him to deliver addresses at the dedication of churches, schoolhouses, colleges, flag-raisings, commencements, and anniversaries, re-unions, political meetings, and all manner of reform movements.  Authors urge him to read their work in manuscript; orators without orations write to him and come to him for address or sermon; applications flow in for letters of introduction highly recommending entire strangers for anything they want.  Agents for books come to him for endorsements, with religious newspapers for subscriptions and articles, and with patent medicines urging him to be ‘cured with one bottle.’